Book Image

Design Made Easy with Inkscape

By : Christopher Rogers
1 (1)
Book Image

Design Made Easy with Inkscape

1 (1)
By: Christopher Rogers

Overview of this book

With the power and versatility of the Inkscape software, making charts, diagrams, illustrations, and UI mockups with infinite resolution becomes enjoyable. If you’re looking to get up to speed with vector illustration in no time, this comprehensive guide has got your back! Design Made Easy with Inkscape is easy to follow and teaches you everything you need to know to create graphics that you can use and reuse forever, for free! You’ll benefit from the author’s industry experience as you go over the basics of vector illustration, discovering tips and tricks for getting professional graphics done fast by leveraging Inkscape's powerful toolset. This book teaches by example, using a great variety of use cases from icons and logos to illustration, web design, and product design. You’ll learn about hotkeys and take a best-practices approach developed over ten years of using Inkscape as a design tool in production. What’s more, this book also includes links to free graphics resources that you can use in all your projects. Whether you’re a new user or a professional, by the end of this book, you’ll have full understanding of how to use Inkscape and its myriad of excellent features to make stunning graphics for your projects.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Finding Your Way Around
7
Part 2: Advanced Shape Editing
13
Part 3: Inkscape’s Power Tools

Automatic spacing and alignment with Smart Snapping options

You may remember in the first chapter when we briefly looked at the snapping options that there were alignment options too. Let’s revisit this and take a closer look at those options and how they work. Recall that the snapping toggle has a little arrow next to it, and we can toggle on/off the alignment options as shown in Figure 4.20:

Figure 4.20 – Toggling off the Bounding Boxes and Nodes options

Figure 4.20 – Toggling off the Bounding Boxes and Nodes options

Normally, we’d just leave these toggled on, but for the sake of demonstration, we’d like to see the effect of just the alignment options. What we find is that when we have multiple shapes in a row, we can add more with the same spacing as the others, which Inkscape will helpfully detect to show snapping and alignment distances matching similar gaps it’s found. Figure 4.21 shows what happens when we drag a third rectangle closer to two others from the right:

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